ORSNZ Newsletter, December
1996

Contents

Department of Engineering Science University of Auckland
project abstracts

Department of Management University of Canterbury project
abstracts

Obituary: Stefan Vajda 1991-95

APORS'97 news

Letters to the editor

ORSNZ visiting lecturer fund

Special issue of Omega on performance
measurements in Asia-Pacific
countries

Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences

Manufacturing & Service Operations
Management — a new
journal

A Note from the Treasurer: Advertising in OR
newsletterAndrew Mason

Thirty-second Annual General Meeting Mikael Ronnqvist

Master research opportunities — University of Auckland

Meetings calendar

GUEST EDITORIAL: OR Contributions to Forestry — A
University of
Canterbury Perspective

A. Graham D. Whyte, P.O. Box 12297, Christchurch 8030, NZ

This largely autobiographical note provides an historical
account of some of
my teaching and research involvement with operations research at the
School of
Forestry, University of Canterbury over the last 26 years. It has
eventuated
for two main reasons: (1) a request from Hans Daellenbach some time ago
for a
personal view on the practical impact of OR on forest management in New
Zealand;
and (2) Prof. David Ryan's Area Profile: Operations Research
in the
August 1996 Newsletter. It is a dreadful admission I have to make that
it took
an apparent lacuna in that account's historical overview to spur me
into writing
this.

Professor Ryan's historical profile states: The
Forest Research
Institute and more recently[my emphasis]
Auckland and
Canterbury Universities have been involved in the development of
Operations
Research models covering most areas of forestry from harvest planning
to logging
operations to timber milling.

With all due respect to his sources of information, the
University of
Canterbury, thanks to collaboration of its OR staff and students with
those in
the School of Forestry, was involved in OR research well before the
FRI. Why do
I know this? Because up to the end of 1969, I was a research scientist
at FRI
before moving to the University of Canterbury and I am unaware there
was any OR
done at FRI by the time I left, except for a few hesitant steps by
myself that
came to nothing really. The School of Forestry opened its doors in 1970
and
later that year I attended an OR short course run by Hans Daellenbach
and John
George. Hans and John introduced the participants, who included two
forest
industry people as well as myself, to OR techniques and not a few
applications
of a forestry nature. I was enthralled by OR's relevance to forestry
problems,
and vowed to include a major section on OR in my teaching right from
the very
first forestry student intake. What struck me most significantly about
what
Hans offered, however, was not just the power of mathematical
modelling, but the
need for a systems approach to problem solving. If the application of
optimisation techniques was not embraced enthusiastically by all
forestry
students, then at least they could not avoid being imbued if not
indoctrinated
in the need for systems analysis by the time they graduated and were
released
into the workforce..

Thus, more emphasis in teaching at the School of Forestry has
been given to
holistic approaches to problem solving than to the nature of various
individual
modelling techniques per se. Borrowing from Fred Baird the analogy of
the
golfer, its a question of knowing when to use the right club in the
right place. In the early seventies, the OR staff at Canterbury
provided special teaching
inputs of OR theory to underpin my teaching of applications, but
gradually over
the years, the taking of special basic OR courses available to students
of all
faculties was made compulsory for first or second year undergraduate
forestry
students in preparation for substantial inputs on applications during
years 3
and 4. To answer partly the question posed by Hans, then, Canterbury
forestry
graduates have taken away the concept of systems and knowledge of the
potential
to use OR in the forest sector, and I believe that philosophy has been
much more
valuable than detailed knowledge of individual modelling techniques.
That is
not to say that modelling was ignored, as will be seen later.

The first example of undergraduate forestry student
applications of OR
occurred in 1973, when one of that years class devised an optimal
solution to
scheduling reforestation of harvested areas using LPGOGO (an
educational Fortran
LP code in H. Daellenbach and E. Bell: User's Guide to LP)
for a
management case study . There was a real limitation on the size of
model he was
able to apply. Thus the following year, another undergraduate
familiarised
himself with the ALPS package on the Burroughs and, with the help of Dr
Bill
Davis of the Computer Centre, produced a harvest scheduling LP model
for his
undergraduate dissertation. The NZ forest industry was at that time
using desk
calculator simulation to plan its wood supply from individual forests
or within
regions, while FRI was still obsessed with stand rather than forest
level
analyses, and so not in need of harvest scheduling models concerned
with
resource allocation. In fact, the first LP applied to wood supply
scheduling in
the NZ forest industry, called C-Plan, was actually devised by John
Hammons, a
Kaingaroa forester, not a FRI researcher, and was implemented for a few
years in
the late seventies and early eighties by one of our graduates, Peter
Hill.

FRI researchers in the late seventies were investigating the
single stem
bucking problem using DP, and developed two systems called MARVL and
AVIS, the
first of which was applied to PROD for single stands. Their stand level
analysis consisted of accumulating volumes of open-market log types,
thus
precluding consideration of forest level allocations. Oscar Garcia,
with his
IFS (Interactive Forest Simulator) in 1981 and FOLPI (Forest Oriented
linear
Programming Interpreter) in 1984, did provide later for a forest and
regional
level harvest planning capability.

If we return to 1975 at the University of Canterbury, a major
opportunity to
utilise OR methodology arose when I was asked to develop systems for
management
planning and control of pine plantations in Fiji. It should be
remembered that
forest research done by FRI up until 1987 did not cost the NZ forest
industry
real money, which left university researchers starved of funding from
the
industry for research on industrial practical problems. Why pay us to
do research when FRI provided such support free? The Fiji project
started off with
my devising the outline of an integrated system for data collection,
information
processing and retrieval, production forecasting, other forms of
modelling,
planning and control. From 1975 to 1986, three or more students a year
from
Canterbury spent their long vacations in Fiji training local staff in
successive
additions to individual parts of that whole system, and conducted
research that
included much monitoring of the accuracy of the then existing modelling
constituents, together with success in operating the system as a whole.
Hans,
who has continued to stress over the years the need to consider
successful
implementation methods, can take heart from the emphasis given to the
importance
of monitoring and control functions in this planning, and the special
realisation it has conferred on the 40 or so students who were involved
in
projects in Fiji .

By 1979 School of Forestry students, Fijian staff and I had
gathered
sufficient data and checked equation components sufficiently to develop
a linear
programming model for scheduling harvests. Kees de Kluyver and I joined
forces
to offer a case study for a graduate OR class, which included such
names well
known in OR circles in New Zealand as Fred Baird, Michael Boon, John
Buchanan,
Gary Eng, John Griffin, Tom Moore, and others. The results of our case
study
were published in the NZOR journal (de Kluyver et al., 1980). As a
direct
outcome of this most enjoyable class, Gary Eng undertook thesis
research towards
an M.Sc. in tree bucking which included consideration of the multiple
as well as
the single stem problem (Eng, 1982; Eng and Whyte, 1982; Eng and
Daellenbach,
1985, and Eng et al., 1986). Gary was later seconded from DSIR in the
mid-1980s
to provide OR support (largely in system design) for FRI's Conversion
Planning
Task Force, as apparently that skill was then lacking at FRI. Fred
Baird
transferred the topic for his PhD research into modelling the NZ forest
sector
(Whyte et al. 1981; Baird, 1982; Whyte and Baird, 1983, and Baird and
Whyte,
1987). In late 1984, of course, Fred transferred his allegiance to
fisheries,
but Hans and I still hold copies of the first 6 chapters of his thesis
draft and
there is still an opportunity for him to complete his degree as an even
more
mature student this time! Nick Winter teamed up with John George and
successfully completed a M.Sc. thesis in 1983 on modelling resource
allocations
for the Canterbury region, while Trevor Eton and John George looked at
forest
planning on the West Coast. Grant Read, Don McNickle and Bruce Lamar
have also
been associated with forestry research projects.

Hans, Kees and I had a paper published in 1981 on the combined
use of MODP
and MOLP to rationalise harvest scheduling of a mix of log products.
One of the
major difficulties with this, with Fred Baird's sector modelling, with
Lance
Broad's MILP to utilisation planning, with the regional analysis of
Steve
Johnson (1989) [see Johnson & Whyte, 1990 and 1992], and with
Gary Eng's
decomposition approach to log bucking, was a consequence of the limited
capabilities of computer hardware at the time. Computers of today, of
course,
allow us to solve such problems with comparative ease and offer the
added
dimension of spreadsheet formulations on which industrial managers
increasingly
rely and with which they are sympathetic, thus making it easier for OR
practitioners to explain the intent and mechanics of optimisation.
Examples of
this spreadsheet approach are to be found in PhD theses by Villanueva
(1992) on
integrated yield forecasting and harvest scheduling, Sicad (1993) on
plywood
modelling for log supply, log peeling, veneer laying up and product
marketing,
Ogweno (1995) on hierarchical modelling and integration of tactical and
operational harvest scheduling, and multiple objective planning of
plantation
development by Aruan (1996). There have also been masters theses, too
numerous
to list here, with a major OR emphasis.

One of the spin-offs for a university research supervisor is
the
availability of data collected by students and supporting agencies in
the
industry which can be used in ways other than to meet just students
needs for
their thesis research. I have been fortunate in acquiring large data
sets in
this way; they are, moreover, relatively clean, because of inbuilt
checking
procedures I incorporated in the data collection components and my
insistence
that research students always get to grips with data validation of
their
information source. I am most grateful to many students and staff of
other
organisations for these collections of valuable data. They have led to
research
publications not only in the field of applied OR (included here in the
Bibliography), but in various other areas of forestry, such as design
and
assessment of mensuration and inventory systems, analysing responses to
silvicultural practices like amelioration of sites at time of
establishment,
fertilisation, thinning and pruning, harvesting, and manufacturing,
marketing
and distribution of forest products (but not listed here). The examples
with a
core of OR modelling in them listed in the bibliography below do not
represent a
complete set, but should be sufficient for illustrative purposes.

But really, publications in all my fields of research have
been strongly
influenced by the total systems approach that Hans instilled me with
all those
years ago, and so it is hard to decide where to draw the line on what
is and is
not OR. The breadth of my research interests that OR led me into, also
made it
logical to extend my interests into forest sector modelling and in
trying to
convince senior forestry professionals, politicians and the public that
there
have been well-established multiple objective modelling capabilities
for 30
years to cope with true forms of multiple use forestry (e.g. Whyte
&
Daellenbach, 1987: Whyte, 1995; Whyte, 1996a and b). The view widely
held by
politicians and the public, mainly as a result of misleading campaigns
by the
environmental lobby and also the predilection of forest planners in New
Zealand
to use predominant rather than true multiple use techniques as the
means of
representing participatory involvement in land use decisions, namely
that
indigenous forest is for preservation and plantations are for
commercial wood
harvesting, is far too simplistic and patently wrong. Consider, for
example, the stupidity of the 1987 separation of NZ forests in this
way, and the hugely
escalating damage in native forests brought about by largely
uncontrolled
increases in possum numbers as a consequence of the ideology that
native forests
can look after themselves using ecological purity as the only active
mechanism. Again, the obsession of a few organisations with the 1991 NZ
Forest Accord, when
its too narrow focus has been superseded by the broader considerations
of the
Resource Management Act of 1991, by the outputs of principle from the
1992 Rio
Summit and by the 1995 Montreal Process of monitoring standards for
environmental performance to which our government is a signatory, needs
comprehensive review. More recently, we have read about arguments over
the sale
of cutting rights for the Bay of Plenty plantation forests, which
actually serve
many more purposes than just wood production - to give but one example,
there
have been more visitors and recreational users over any given period to
one 5
000 ha plantation in this sale, namely Whakarewarewa, than to all the
6.2
million ha of native forest throughout New Zealand. What is the point
in arguing
whether the selling price was fair or not, when you use inappropriate
valuation
methodology? If only we could open the eyes of the politicians, various
lobbyists, the media and the general public to a holistic systems
approach to
problem solving, our physical and other resources would be far less
endangered. So Hans and all of us OR practitioners should still have a
mission, a challenge
and a market out there to open peoples eyes to the need for a holistic
set of
practical realities, together with a recognition of the further need to
compromise and effect trade-offs when making decisions. Given the
confrontational approach prevalent throughout our society, this may be
a tall
order, despite our choice of MMP as the form of elected government.

In conclusion, I hope that Newsletter readers will agree that
OR is being
employed in NZ forestry, at least by some forestry professionals if not
politicians, and that the University of Canterbury has pioneered the
use of OR
in forestry since the early 70s, well before FRI. But, the main
inference that
OR practitioners should draw is the need for and opportunities to
intensify
their efforts to promote OR in forestry still more: characterising the
system
holistically and choosing the correct questions to address within the
real
problems to be solved, before jumping in with our favourite
optimisation models
should be our approach, if my own 26 years of experience with OR has
taught me
anything.

PUBLISHING SCIENTIFIC PAPERS ON THE INTERNET

Publishing of scientific papers in the traditional hard copy
journal form is
technology of the past. As pointed out in the March Editorial of the OR
Newsletter this mode is unwieldy, notoriously slow, and
fraught by real or
perceived favouritism of belonging to one of the in-groups associated
with
various journals. Publishing on the Internet through dedicated Websites
or
bulletin boards is one promising way of the future. There are obviously
some
problems associated with this an approach, such as how to separate the
chaff
from the corn, or how to have an effective reviewing process.

I see the following major problems with the current journal
publishing
process:

It takes forever to get reviews, and another eternity to
see a paper
actually published. A journal can take a year to reject a (sometimes
good) paper
and then you start afresh.

Reviewers are overloaded with all sorts of work, and
reviews are among
their least rewarded activities.

Anonymous reviews imply reviewers do not really have to be
careful.
Sometimes they even have an interest to stump a paper that conflicts
with their
own work. Combined with (2), the result may often be a sham.

Editors do not have the ability to really shape their
journal. They are
constrained to select from the set of papers submitted to them. Even if
they
solicit papers actively, many of them consider themselves bound by the
decisions
of reviewers. Academically, this has justification, but the results may
not be
desirable. (I once submitted a paper to a top journal although I
thought it was
not a good fit. I did it at the explicit request of the area editor who
said he
would like to branch in the direction my paper belonged to. I made sure
he saw
the paper first, and he actually indicated he liked it. The reviewers
thought
differently about branching. The paper was therefore rejected.)

These problems are known to all of us, and I'm sure others
could add more to
the list. They can be solved partially or completely with Internet
publishing
provided it is done right. Of course, simply putting a paper on
Internet is not
formally different from writing a working paper, but it is much more
accessible,
and that can make a huge difference if we change our system to suit the
new
technical realities. Here are the ideas:

Working papers should be published within interest areas,
i.e., on
bulletin boards. There is no formal need to belong to a
university/research
institute to do so.

Anybody is encouraged to publish a review or critique of
any paper that is
on the board, provided the review is signed. There is no reason to be
ashamed of
a good review.

Universities (i.e., we ourselves, with other hats on)
should consider the
possibility to count such reviewing as part of the academic duties of
faculty
members. Since reviews will be signed, they can be assessed by
promotion
committees, etc. If we do that, then reviewers will come forward by
themselves!

Editors, whose real job is to archive good papers, will
surf the network
and select papers they like. If these papers have good reviews
attached, they
are publishable as is. Or some journals may be based on editorial
decisions.
Otherwise, reviews may be solicited in the normal way, with the consent
of the
author. (Such consent is necessary because it will preempt publication
by other
journals — see Problem [1] above.)

Authors may still choose to ask editors to consider their
work. Their job
will be especially easy if someone bothered to review their work
(favourably).
They will also have the right to refuse publication in journals that do
not
attract them.

Revisions will be done in the usual way by authors
responding to comments
that they accept. So, revised papers may be put on the net often. I
also
anticipate lively discussions between reviewers and authors — this will
be
really worthwhile! Some of the best journals have discussions
incorporated
within them, but they are a minority.

A paper nobody reviews is a non-entity in a way, but at
least it is done
by closing our ears rather than by shutting the author's mouth. Free
speech does
not imply everybody has to listen.

All these ideas need more work yet, but I think they can help
solve the
problems listed. I look forward to hear your comments, suggestions, and
ways to
fine-tune this process.

THE 32nd ANNUAL CONFERENCE

The conference showed once again that OR is alive and well in
New Zealand. A sparkling array of personalities and papers paraded
before us over the two
days. NZ is well served by OR over a wide range of areas in which we
have
particular expertise, and many of the papers reflected this. All the
old
favourites were there — electricity scheduling, airline scheduling,
vehicle
routing, to mention just a few. A wide variety to tempt even the most
jaded OR
appetite.

As has often been the case in the past, it was up to our
invited speakers to
widen our horizons by describing the work going on overseas. Clay
Whybark's
talk on Evolving OR and Graham Mills' summary of the Australian OR
scene both —
in different ways — showed the wide range of issues which will face
future OR practitioners.

New issues and new methods are becoming apparent on the local
scene too. I
particularly enjoyed Kerry Mayes' talk on Drama Theory. It is not often
we get
Hamlet at an OR conference. Maybe one day someone will give a talk
entitled ?A
Comedy of Errors'. Will new OR graduates be required to take English
Literature
as a prerequisite? (That would give a badly needed boost to
their level of
literacy, the editor)

The Young Practitioners' papers were, as usual, the highlight
of the
conference. The incredible effort put into these projects amazes me.
The
quality of research, the clarity of thinking, and the high standard of
presentation are all aspects of which the participants can be proud.
May they
go to even greater heights in later years. Praise must also go to the
University staff for their excellent guidance, and to those industries
who have
had the foresight and enthusiasm to sponsor these projects.

The theoretical papers were also very interesting. Much
original work is
going on here, and it good to see it presented at conference. It is
perhaps
unfair to pick out favourites, but Andy Philpott's presentation (with
D. Ryan
and G. Zakeri) on ?Inexact Cuts in Benders' Decomposition' and N. Zhu
and K.
Broughan on 'Reducing the Number of Variables in Integer Programming'
struck me
as particularly outstanding.

With the next conference being in Australia, our Aussie
colleagues will have
to look to their laurels to come anywhere near our conference standard.
A
superbly well organised conference, thanks to the hard work of the
Management
Department at Canterbury.

BRANCH GOSSIP COLUMN

Massey Mutterings

Mahyar Amouzegar is on overseas leave for two months, visiting
UCLA's
Optimization and Communications Lab as a Research Engineer (and
conveniently
missing the annual grade massaging exercise). He has also presented an
Invited
Paper at the INFORMS Conference in Atlanta, "On Test Problem
Construction
for Linear Bilevel Programming Problems" (joint work with K.
Moshirvaziri).

Mark Bebbington (with David Vere-Jones) was awarded a
substantial grant
from the latest Marsden Fund round, for work on stochastic modelling of
earthquake processes.

Symonds Street Stories - Auckland

David Robb, Dept of Management Science and Information
Systems, University
of Auckland, Auckland[email protected]

Professor Michael Rothkopf (School of Business and RUTCOR,
Rutgers
University) visited the University of Auckland on November 5 (is there
some
ominous symbolism in the US Election being held on Guy Fawkes Day?). He
encouraged faculty to submit applied OR papers to Interfaces
(of which
he is Editor-in-Chief).

Mike gave a seminar providing an overview of Bidding Theory
and a potpourri
of new results in this field. He noted the lack of realism in numerous
models
which fail to capture the dynamism of the marketplace. For instance,
the
auction method attributed to Vickrey (the co-winner of the 1996 Nobel
Prize
winner in Economics) where the best bidder wins but is awarded the
amount of the
best losing bid is rarely used in practice, as few auctions are single
isolated
events.

One must take into account how competitors will respond (in
subsequent
auctions) to revealed information. In addition, third parties may end
up
capturing a good deal of the revealed economic rent (the difference
between the
best two bids). Mike discussed a refinement of the (English) oral
auction in
which the amount of revealed information (bidders dropping out) is
limited by
selecting (e.g., at random) a pair of bidders who bid until one drops
out and is
replaced by another bidder, etc.

Bid evaluation problems in which bidders are free to bid on
any combination
of multiple items for sale (e.g., in oil exploration, cutting rights,
or
teaching papers!), can give rise to very difficult combinatorial
optimisation
problems. Mike presented several solutions, including the "political"
one — generating a heuristic solution and specifying a fixed time for
the
bidders to come up with a better one (outsourcing the optimisation!).

The August 1996 issue OR/MS Today devotes
a dozen pages to the
(under-represented?!) topic of affirmative action and Mike's talk
continued the
debate by demonstrating that cost and efficiency is not always
sacrificed when
subsidies are given to some players (he prudently avoided discussing
issues of "fairness").

We wished Mike well on his vacation, lamenting that he was
unable to visit
Wellington and consult to several beleaguered competitive bidders
domiciled in
some debugged chambers and seeking to minimise revealed information.

Mainland News

Our major highlight since the last newsletter was, of course,
the ORSNZ
Annual conference which was attended by approximately 75 participants.
It was a
busy time for the branch members, and we thank all those who attended
and
participated in the conference. In typical Canterbury style, even the
sun and
the snow we ordered arrived on time!

In November we were privileged to have a two-day visit by
Professor Peter
Checkland from the University of Lancaster — yes 'the' Peter Checkland.
He
obviously needs no introduction. He gave two seminars - the first
explaining
Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) and a second outlining his experiences
with SSM
in developing an information system for a hospital. Both seminars were
very
enlightening and explained just how SSM is used in a real world
context. The
seminars attracted many people from around campus indicating the how
SSM
integrates OR and other disciplines.

In other news, the Department of Management has recently
appointed Dr Andrew
Tobias from the University of Birmingham to a senior lectureship
position in
Operations Management. He is a long standing member of the UK
Operational
Research Society and visited the Department for several months in 1994.

Wellington Branch News

Our Management Group has a new staff member. Michelle Baron
joined our
staff in July of this year. She came to New Zealand from California's
San
Francisco Bay Area in the United States, after completing a PhD in the
Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management at
Stanford
University. Below is a brief summary of her PhD research.

Title: Managing the Tradeoff Between Productivity
and Safety: Risk
Management Strategies for Critical Engineering Systems. The
research is
intended to provide decision support in the design and evaluation of
alternative
risk management strategies for critical operations. In particular, the
research
focuses on safety-critical systems such as offshore oil platforms,
space
systems, chemical processing facilities, and nuclear power plants. In
such
systems, there is often a real or perceived conflict between the
operational
objectives of productivity and safety. This is particularly evident in
the
short-term and under tight resource constraints. In failing to
adequately
recognise and manage potential trade-offs, it may be difficult to give
the more
abstract notion of safety a high priority at the expense of the more
obvious and
immediate goals of high production and reduced operating costs.

The research uses a dynamic systems analysis approach to adapt
management
strategies to the specific characteristics of the physical system.
Combining
probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) and dynamic stochastic models, we
compute
expected risk, production, and cost patterns over the life of the
system as
functions of strategic options and operating policies. System safety
and
productivity are optimally balanced using decision analysis. The
methodology
has been applied to the management of planned and unplanned outages in
nuclear
power plants.

Department of Engineering Science University of
Auckland: Year Four
Project Abstracts

Final year students completing a BE in Engineering Science at
the University
of Auckland must carry out a project. This project, which is worth 3
papers,
represents approximately 20% of the final year's mark. It involves
modelling
some practical situation, writing a report of about 40 pages, and
giving an oral
presentation. Approximately half the class choose projects associated
with
Operations Research problems. The following abstracts give brief
descriptions of
this year's OR projects and the students who conducted them.

Cadbury Confectionery Ltd in Dunedin currently operate a
manual rostering
program, based on employees working two-week intervals of the same
shift, and
rotating back to the same pattern after a period of six weeks. Using a
new
computer-based optimization technique, Cadbury's can give its employees
the
chance to indicate their preferences for each of the shift times for a
four week
period. This project aims to design a model that incorporates these
preferences, as well as other constraints thus enabling the development
of a
roster that caters to the satisfaction of as many employees as
possible. The
model has shown that this type of computer-based scheduling system is a
useful
tool, offering several advantages over the current manual technique.
With
further development the model could lead to better solutions, giving
employees
greater satisfaction and enhancing the standard of their work.

New Zealand Customs have the responsibility of protecting the
country's
borders. To do this, Customs staff are required to 'process' travellers
coming
into and going out of the country. Rostering these staff throughout
each day
creates a problem. This problem at Auckland International Airport is
currently
being solved using an heuristic technique. This solution produces a
roster which
satisfies Customs' policy with regard to processing passengers within a
specified time constraint, but it does not guarantee to find an
optimal, least
cost solution. This project investigated solving the staffing problem
by using a
dynamic programming approach which produces a near optimal work
requirement
solution. The solution procedure initially finds passenger processing
flows
throughout the day. It then calculates the management quality policy
'target-points', refines them, and using these refined target points as
bounds
to find a staffing solution. Solutions vary depending on the number of
open
booths, and have costs associated with them accordingly. The best
solution is
chosen so that the cost is minimised. Finally the required number of
open booths
throughout the day is found for the combined problem of both arriving
and
departing passengers. This code along with the rostering code will be
incorporated and used by Customs Management at the airport.

Optimizing year-four project allocations for the
Engineering Science
Department of the University of Auckland by T. Scott

In this report the solution of the problem of assigning
students to Year
Four projects in Engineering Science is described. The main objectives
of this
project were to formulate and implement an integer programming model to
optimise
the allocation. The method used is essentially a two stage process.
Firstly all
the possible subsets of student/project pairings are generated for each
Staff
member using preferential bids for projects. A Set Partitioning
Optimisation
Model is formulated and solved to produce an optimal allocation of
students to
projects. The resulting allocations are then compared with manual
allocations.

Optimising component packaging at Fisher &
Paykel by E. Boysen

This project is concerned with developing a method of
optimally packing
washing machine components into a selection of boxes. The aim is to
minimise the
total volume of boxes used while satisfying the required demand for
components. The problem is modelled as a multi-bin packing problem and
is solved using the
CPLEX optimisation program which uses a branch and bound algorithm.
Results show
this model is well suited for a problem of this size, calculates a
reduction in
volume and box utilisation, and has the potential to solve large
problems.

Stochastic modelling for fuel filling in the LAX-SYD
sector by Lok
Yan Lin

Air New Zealand would like to minimise their expenditure on
aviation fuel.
The fuel required on a given sector depends on the flight plan, the
passengers
and freight loaded, and on the weather. Fuel can be loaded in several
stages
before takeoff, each having increasing fixed cost. The aim of this
project was
to develop some pilot models for computing optimal fuel filling
strategies using
decision analysis in a spreadsheet program.

The aim of this project is to create a data management system
to provide
high quality rosters for staff at the Sheraton, Auckland. The rosters
will be
created for a seven day period taking into account the staffs'
preferences,
requests and any existing commitments. This will be performed while
ensuring
that they are utilised effectively across the entire organisation. A
system has
been developed that takes into account the staffs' history, and finds
the best
allocation of work for these employees to meet the staffing
requirements. Some
of the aspects that are desirable in the rosters include:

Periods of 4 or 5 consecutive days on followed by 2 or 3
consecutive days
off.

A variation in department, and hence in skill requirement.

Regularity in start times throughout the week.

When the seven day model was extended to account for the
staffing
requirements on the eighth day, a 12% reduction in the cost per day was
achieved. This is because the roster is better constructed to deal with
the
transition into the next week. This shows that the staffing
requirements in the
future affect the rostering of today.

Hes Brothers Co (NZ) Ltd is an importing company that is
interested in
reducing its inventory costs. The main problem with this is that the
demand is
unknown until after they have purchased the inventory. This project
looks at
what the model for this problem is and at how it could be solved using
stochastic dynamic programming. Two methods for stochastic dynamic
programming
were looked at, a normal stochastic dynamic program which solved all of
the
variables at the same time, and a method that first divided up the
budget and
then found the best solution based on that budget division. Neither of
these
methods could be used to solve to optimality as they require too much
computing
power. However, the division of the budget method can be used in
conjunction
with the purchasing managers experience to help reduce the inventory
costs to
the company.

Stochastic Benders' decomposition is a technique for computing
the solution
to linear programs that may be divided into a series of almost
independent sub
problems the solutions of which give direction to the solution of a
master
problem which provides parameters the sub problems must satisfy. After
many
constraints or cuts have been added the master problems become slow to
solve.
Many of the constraints added will be redundant and can be removed. The
aim of
this project is to determine whether the effort of seeking and removing
these
additional constraints will lead to an overall improvement and if so to
determine when and how in the solution process this should be done, as
well as
quantifying the result that can be expected should this procedure be
carried
out. After implementing and refining a procedure to carry out this task
it was
found that with the sample information given we could solve the problem
in 60%
of the time it would have previously taken, as well as being able to
predict
circumstances where it is advisable to use this procedure. In addition
a quick
method of deleting redundant constraints from the second to last stage
was
shown.

Real time load allocation in hydro-electric generation
by N.
Bartlett

Hydro-electric power is created by the conversion of potential
energy of
water into electricity through the operation of turbines. These
turbines make up
parts of generation units which are committed by power utilities to
meet demand,
forming a schedule called a pre-dispatch. However demand is uncertain
and the
local station operators are left to meet the uncertainty in demand as
it arises
by allocating the load instantaneously. This project investigates the
determination of a method called Demand Allocation in Real
Time (DART) which aims to optimise the real time allocation
of load to meet demand at an
instant in time, while complying with conditions laid out in the
pre-dispatch.
The intention is to optimise allocation in a way that minimises the use
of water
resource over the entire system given a set of committed units. DART is
not
designed to work on its own. It is intended that it will be implemented
with a
new pre-dispatch generation model which will provide end conditions for
DART to
work to. DART in turn provides a new set of conditions from which the
pre-dispatch is to be re-calculated.

Minimising changeover costs on a single machine at
Carter Holt Harvey
Tissue Ltd by M. McLauchlan

In this project an algorithm is implemented to minimise the
changeover cost
on a single machine. This model gives a good solution to the problem of
minimising the changeover costs for Carter Holt Harvey Tissue machines.
The
emphasis on changeover costs can be lightened if a production schedule
is
produced from a simple inventory model that does not allow any
'stock-outs' for
any of the products. For this type of inventory model the production
schedule
incurs a higher loss of production in terms of changeover due to more
frequent
inventory replenishments but inventory costs are lowered substantially.
The
overall cost for this type of inventory model is lower.

Analytic description of tree stem geometry
by T. Allsopp

Curves were fitted to measure tree stem geometry data. The
fitted curves
were used to generate corrected sets of data as input for an existing
software
package that determined the optimal cutting schemes. The solutions for
the
original measured data and the generated data were compared in terms of
sweep,
wobble, length and value. A hypothetical tree stem was generated with a
known
amount of error and the error in the fitted curve was calculated. It
was found
that smoothing the data resulted in more valuable logs becoming
feasible and
thus the solutions gave, on average, a higher value, and that the value
per unit
length of every test tree stem had less error than the error
introduced. The
same technique was applied to log geometry data and the fitted curves
were used
to transform the co-ordinates describing the log geometry and the
positions of
features on the log such that the logs were straight lines in the
transformed
co-ordinate system. These transformed co-ordinates were used as input
to
existing software for determining the optimal cutting pattern for the
breakdown
of logs into boards in order to estimate the value recoverable using
saws
capable of cutting around swept logs. It was found that this
transformation
resulted in solutions yielding higher value boards and an overall
increase in
the amount of each log used.

New Zealand Aluminium Smelter located at Tiwai Point near
Invercargill
produces aluminium by reducing alumina electrolytically. The smelter
uses an
available energy block during a calendar month, which is paid for at
the end of
the month. Differences against a monthly target incur high costs. This
report
proposes and describes a solution approach to minimise the deviation
from the
target energy consumption and thereby maximise the cost efficiency.
Numerical
results on data obtained from the smelter show that the approach is
indeed
valid.

Roster planning for B747-200 flight engineers at Air
New Zealand by
G. Jones

Air New Zealand publishes a new timetable of flights on a six
monthly basis.
From the timetable of flights, Air New Zealand logistics staff
construct tours
of duty (TODs) for the crew who must fly them. These tours of duty are
then
assigned to individual crew in a rostering process. In order to check
the
efficiency and practicality of a set of tours of duty logistics staff
estimate
the number crew required to fly a set of tours of duty. At present the
estimation of crew requirements for covering a set of TODs in a roster
period is
based on experience and good judgement. This project describes the
development
of a roster planning tool for Air New Zealand's logistics staff. Its
purpose is
to take a set of generated TODs for a 28 day period and give the
minimum number
of crew required to fly the duties. This project concentrates on the
development
of this tool for B747-200 flight engineers but the approach can be
extended to
other crew groups. The project seeks to solve the roster construction
problem
through an automated approach involving dynamic column generation.
Solving to
optimality is a two stage process. Firstly an optimal solution of TOD
allocation
to crew is generated. Secondly the optimal solution is forced integer
using
constraint branching. The model is set up so as to minimise the number
of crew
needed to cover all of the work. A successful operation of the model
involved a
total allocation of 187 trips to a maximum of 68 crew. The optimal
solution
found that only 66 crew were required to cover all of the work.

Construction of a daily schedule of duties for
locomotive engineers by A. Ng

This project develops a set-partitioning model and solution
procedure to
construct a schedule of driver duties for Tranz Metro engineers for
each day of
the week so that all tasks are completed at minimal cost by the
available staff. The number of driver shifts and the total paid hours
including overtime hours
are minimized.

This report describes the problem regarding the construction
of fortnightly
cyclic rosters for engineers at Tranz Rail. This roster satisfies the
employment contract and rostering constraints. This report will also
introduce
a method of solution for this construction. The method uses a three
stage
approach. Firstly a large number of legal lines of work are generated
for the
first half of the fortnight. Using these lines of work a Generalised
Set
Partitioning optimisation model is formulated and solved to produce an
optimal
subroster over these individual weeks. The third stage involves
executing the
first two stages for the second half of the fortnight to find a second
optimal
subroster. This second subroster fits within the restrictions of the
previously
solved subroster. By linking the solutions of the subrosters a
fortnightly
cyclic roster is built. This third stage can be executed iteratively so
that
once the second week is solved it takes the place of the first week and
so a new
second week is generated. The resulting rosters are then analysed and
compared
with a manual solution. Possible improvements and extensions are
discussed.

Department of Management University of Canterbury
M.Com./B.Sc.(Hons)
Project Abstracts

These practical projects represent the equivalent of one out
of six papers.

Fire station locational analysis by Oliver
Spinks and Simon Oliver

The New Zealand Fire Service is constantly making both
tactical and
strategic changes to improve the quality of service they provide. This
study
concentrated on one fire station in Christchurch for which relocation
is being
considered. The analysis used a GIS package and data display tool for
finding
the locations minimizing travel times in the demongraphic area to be
covered now
and for projected trends twenty years in the future, meeting Government
service
standards as to response times.

Labour rostering for the Lyttelton Port Company
by Andrew Gormley
and Adam Tankersley

Uncertainties about ship arrivals create problems in rostering
labour for
container operations. The size of the problem was determined and a
number of
possible strategies investigated. The cost in terms of increased wages
and
overtime incurred due to imperfect information about ship arrival times
and
cargo volume was determined. The possibility of using a spreadsheet
based
system to computerise the rostering process was also considered, but
was found
to offer only limited advantages over the current hand method using A2
sheets.

Like many expanding companies, Hamilton Jet faces a difficult
problem of
allocating manufacturing capacity between production of new jet units,
and
spares provisioning. An Inventory Manager, written in EXCEL, forecasts
the
demand for spares and allows the user to choose between various
suggested
optimal replenishment quantities and reorder points for alternative
provisioning
strategies.

Obituary: Stefan Vajda 1901-95

Stefan Vajda came to England as a refugee in 1939. He obtained
a visa to
England through his friend and philosopher Karl Popper, who had offered
him a
job in New Zealand. In fact, he never came to NZ. After a period of
internment
on the Isle of Man, he became involved in mathematical research for the
Admiralty in 1944 and became one of the leaders in the new field of
operational
research. After the war, he took over as the head of the mathematics
group,
developing contacts with such people as David Cox and Henry Daniels,
statisticians in Cambridge. Martin Beale agreed to join the Admiralty
and
together with Stefan became interested in the newly developed technique
of LP,
which became the subject of Stefan's first book, published in 1956.
Stefan
worked for the Admiralty until 1965, and at the age of 63 became the
first
professor of OR at the University of Birmingham.

Stefan produced 15 books on subjects ranging from manpower
planning to
mathematical games, as well a publishing many scientific papers on
actuarial
sciences, statistics, and OR topics. He was a Fellow of the Royal
Statistical
Society, a Companion of the OR Society, and an Honorary Member of the
Institute
of Actuaries.

(Adapted from John Bather's comments in the Journal
of the Royal
Statistical Society.)

APORS'97 NEWS

APORS'97 is now just 12 months away! This conference, the 4th
Conference of
the Association of Asian- Pacific Operational Research Societies, is to
be held
from November 30 till 4 December 1997 at the soon-to-be- completed
World
Congress Centre in Melbourne. The deadline for submitting abstracts is
also
coming up fast: 28 February 1997, so the main purpose of this letter is
to
invite you all to submit a paper, or register your interest in
attending, or
being otherwise involved — please read on!

As co-organisers of the conference, ORSNZ has been allocated
several special
slots for events: we have been invited to present a modest number of
tutorials,
and we are also organising a number of streams and sessions. We already
have a
number of streams and sessions planned, but there is still time to add
to the
list, just! So if you would be interested in finding out more about
offering a
tutorial or workshop, or organising a stream or session, please contact
me as
soon as possible.

We also have promised to organise some pre-and post-conference
tours for
conference participants to visit NZ — if any of you have
recommendations on
that topic, please let me know.

I can recommend that you visit the APORS'97 web site for more
information. You can even register, and submit your paper on line. Or
if you prefer, contact
me or the APORS secretariat for a brochure. Addresses are at the foot
of this
letter.

Remember we are not having an ORSNZ conference next year, and
travel to
Australia may cost about the same as internal travel, so do put in a
paper
abstract, and plan on attending APORS'97. It'll be a great opportunity
to share
the best of OR applications and theory from the whole of the
Asia-Pacific region
and beyond. A rare opportunity for most of us. Remember the dates: 28
February
1997 for paper abstracts, and 30 November - 4 December for the
conference
itself. I look forward to hearing from you with suggestions,
contributions or
enquiries, and look forward to seeing you there!

ORSNZ has been invited to contribute to tutorials, workshops,
streams, and
sessions. Below is the tentative list of session/stream topics and
organisers/presenters (subject to possible changes) that have been
suggested by
ORSNZ members so far. Papers presented in these sessions will be termed
?invited papers'.

This list is by no means comprehensive. If any ORSNZ member
wishes to
submit further proposals, please contact Vicky Mabin immediately.
Similarly, if
you have a suitable paper to fit into one of the above
sessions/streams, please
approach to organizers promptly.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

OR Library Stocks

At a Management Systems, University of Waikato, staff meeting
last week, the
few library $'s we have left for 1996 drew the inevitable question of
which
journals we should continue subscribing to. The International Jl of
Production
Research has raised its subscription to $1800. Should we keep it. Last
year we
finally gave the reluctant chop to EJOR: $3000 per year was just TOO
much. Now
as education $'s get harder to come by, such conversations are probably
becoming
more common at institutions around the country. My point is these
decisions

are being made relatively independently.

I remember making the suggestion of a two tiered system of
library stocks at
an OR in NZ Education forum several years ago. The idea was the second
tier
would contain a list of journals that we felt should be held somewhere
in NZ
that didn't come into the first tier: journals that an institution felt
they
must hold. Second tier holdings would be spread around in proportion to
OR/MS
EFTS's. Hopefully this would lead to a rationalized stock. Interloan
(modified)
would do the rest. Well the suggestion at the time went down like the
proverbial
lead balloon. Our then 'rich' Auckland and Canterbury cousins couldn't
see the
need. Wellington had the AMD library a stones throw away. We can't help
it if
you're poor was the impression given. Well the "nouveau pauvre" may
just have swelled to the point where the idea might be worth
revisiting. How
about the library person on our Society's committee assignments asking
their
librarian to see which of the IAOR journals are held in NZ. Circulating
a
summarized list would be a simple service, appreciated in its own
right. A
Newsletter article? If there was support for going further, journals
could be
priced and a survey to each OR group? (journals we expect to continue
subscribing to for the foreseeable future; journals we expect to stop
subscribing to; journals we'd like to see stocked in NZ; that sort of
thing).
Savings, costs (tangible and intangible). This assumes we will be
dependent on
paper versions for a while yet. Could be a study for an OR student
looking for a
project: "Rationalizing Library Holdings For OR By OR".

PS. What has become of that marvellous AMD OR stock? I'm
meaning the library
variety of course, but perhaps Hugh or Bruce could do us something for
the
people version. Perhaps the "class of 1990, where are they now?"
Another Newsletter article?

ORSNZ Visting Lecturer Fund

The Council of The Operational Research Society is pleased to
announce the
formation of the ORSNZ Visiting Lecturer Fund. This fund will be formed
from a
proportion of member's subscriptions to assist the travel within New
Zealand of
internationally recognized OR academics and practitioners who are
visiting this
country. In special circumstances the Fund might be used to support a
visit
from Australia. The fund is intended to encourage the interaction of
the
visitor with all of the regional branches of the Society, and it will
be
expected that the visitor give lectures at each of these branches.

Grants-in-aid from the fund will be available to a maximum of
$500. To apply
for such a grant, the host of the visitor in New Zealand should apply
in writing
to:

The Secretary ORSNZ

Department of Engineering Science, University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

AUCKLAND

enclosing a curriculum vitae for the visitor, and a proposed
itinerary. Applications will be considered by Council at the end of
January and at the end
of June, for visits occurring in the next twelve months.

Special Issue of OMEGA on performance
measurements in Asia-Pacific
countries

Professors W.W. Cooper, K. Tone, and T. Sueyoshi are the guest
editors of
a special issue on performance measures in Asia-Pacific countries,
devoted to
the role and effectiveness aspects of management science in our region,
covering
DEA and its variants, including multi-method papers. Papers should be
submitted
in quadruplicate to one of the guest editors by 31 December 1996 and
should
conform to the normal guidelines. The issue is scheduled to appear in
the
latter part of 1997.

Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences

The Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision
Sciences is a new
journal devoted to the practical problems of mathematics, Operations
Research,
and Statistics. Its primary aim is to rapidly publish carefully
refereed papers
treating practical problems of Mathematics, Operations Research, and
Statistics
without compromising mathematical precision. The Journal covers a wide
range of
applied and theoretical subjects, including: Optimization, and
Heuristic
Methods; Stochastic Systems; Mathematical Modelling; and Numerical
Methods and
Analysis. Emphasis will be given to papers that address both the
theoretical
aspects and the application aspects (including computational). In
addition, the
Journal will also consider papers dealing with applied mathematical
sciences
that have a practical implication (for example computational techniques
in
Operations Research or Statistics). Of special interest will be papers
dealing
with modelling and analysis of systems that are important to New
Zealand
society.

Manufacturing & Service Operations
Management — A new journal

MSOM is a new international research
quarterly to be published by
INFORMS, dedicated to publishing state- of-the-art theory and practice
articles
related to managing all aspects of production of goods and services.
Four broad
classes of manuscripts are of particular interest: (1) applications of
mathematical modelling to operations management in novel and
interesting ways;
(2) applications of economics, OB, or psychology to operations
management; (3)
the interface between operations management and other functional areas;
and (4)
interpretation of practice from the viewpoint of current theory. Review
articles and practice-oriented surveys are also of interest.

A Note from the Treasurer: Advertising in the OR Newsletter

As treasurer of the Operational Research Society, I am keenly
aware of the
need to supplement the ORSNZ's annual income. To this end, we have
always
welcomed advertising in the newsletter. In some cases, such as in the
September
mailing, we have included publicity material provided directly by an
outside
organisation. (Only members with New Zealand addresses will have
received this.) We welcome members' feedback on this means of raising
much needed funds to
reduce the Society's recent annual deficits.

Thirty-second Annual General Meeting

The meeting was held on the 29 August 1996 at Canterbury
University,
Christchurch. The major decisions taken were:

1. New fees: There was a consensus at the
meeting to have the fees
to the closest five dollars and to keep the current structure (in
brackets:
proposed early pay discount)

Standard Membership $50 ($45)

Student/Retired Member $15 ($15)

Corporate Membership $160 ($160)

Corporate Sponsorship $420 ($420)

Journal Only (Libraries)$40 ($40)

Newsletter Only (Libraries)$15 ($15)

Conference Proceedings $20 ($20) (no entry fee will be charged)

Two related issues were that student members will be able to
remain as
student members during the first year after finishing their degree, and
that
overseas members will be charged for the extra cost of mailing.

2. APJOR: There was decided that APJOR will
be a voluntary
subscription to all members and that the Proceeding from the annual
conference
will replace APJOR. This will take effect from the financial year
1997/1998.

3. New Officers: The following officers
were all elected unopposed:

President A Philpott

Vice President D Ryan

Secretary M Ronnqvist

Treasurer A Mason

Others:G Read, B Cavana, V Mabin, D Robb, J Buchanan, J Lermit

Auditor Paul Rouse

Masters Research Opportunities — University of Auckland

Dr Andy Philpott and Dr Andrew Mason are currently looking for
students to
undertake the following three OR Masters research projects in the
Department of Engineering Science at Auckland University. It is hoped
that the first two of
these projects will be supported by GRiF funding to the tune of about
$18,000
over 16 months, while the third will get private sponsorship funding.
Successful
applicants will typically complete 3 papers and a thesis to obtain a
Masters
degree. They will also be expected to spend 50% of their time working
with the
commercial partner at their site. Please contact Dr Philpott or Dr
Mason at the
following addresses if you wish to be considered for either of these
projects:

KiwiTech Sailing Optimisation

The Auckland based company KiwiTech develops hardware and
software products
for the high end yacht racing, yacht cruising and power boat markets.
KiwiTech
software and hardware products are marketed worldwide and have been
used in all
major yacht racing events including the 1995 America's Cup aboard Black
Magic
and Tag Heuer. Main software products are the RaceTech yacht racing and
performance analysis package, the SailTech software package for
cruising
sailors, and the PowerTech chart plotter for launch owners. Other
products
include Windows based Weather Fax software and a Yacht Racing Rules
Expert
System. KiwiTech also produces and resells a range of ruggedised PC
equipment
and accessories suitable for marine use.

KiwiTech wishes to develop weather routing systems primarily
to strengthen
its position in the high end yacht racing market. Weather routing
software is a
key requirement of high end offshore campaigns, such as the Whitbread
Round the
World Race. This software has not been widely used outside this arena
due to
high cost, and ease of use problems. KiwiTech see a position for a
reasonably
priced weather routing package for high to mid range offshore yacht
racers such
as Whitbread and Admirals' Cup, and a similar optimisation package for
superyachts and ocean cruisers. The technology can also be applied to
tactical
choices for short course round the buoys racing from America's Cup down
to club
racers.

The desired outcome of this project is to produce a suite of
software tools
for determining routes for racing and cruising yachts which minimize
the time
taken for them to sail to a given destination. The scope of the project
will
include the short-course routing problem, in which the weather and
tidal current
conditions are assumed to be known, as well as the long-course problem,
in which
uncertainty in the weather must be accommodated.

There has been quite a large body of research carried out on
the weather
routing of commercial vessels, but relatively little work has been done
for
sailing vessels. Some theoretical approaches for accommodating weather
uncertainty have been suggested, but these have not been implemented
and tested
in practice. The current project will focus on the extension and
successful
implementation of the approaches suggested in the literature into a
user-friendly code.

We seek a candidate with a good honours degree in either
Engineering,
Mathematics or Computer Science, with some experience of optimization
and
competency in programming in C. Candidates with experience in using
C++, in
particular Microsoft Foundations Classes on the Win32 platform will be
preferred, although such experience is not mandatory. Candidates with
an
interest in yacht racing will also be preferred, although yachting
experience is
not considered essential.

Optimizing Telecommunications Technology Decisions:

Telecommunications companies are
regularly faced with decisions
relating to the augmentation of capacity in the lines connecting
subscribers to
local exchanges. The main decisions to be made determine what
technology should
be adopted in increasing this capacity. The cable technologies
available are
wireless, copper cable, or optical fibre, all at different costs. The
basic
problem is to determine a choice of technology for each node and line
which is
compatible with its neighbours and which gives the least cost. The
desired
outcome of this project is to produce a suite of computer programs
which use
dynamic programming techniques to solve these capital provisioning
problems.

A student contemplating this project will enrol for a Masters
degree in
Engineering Science and so should therefore have a good honours degree
in either
Engineering, Mathematics, Computer Science or Operations Research. Some
acquaintance with dynamic and stochastic programming is preferred but
not
essential.

Queueing, Simulation and Rostering:

Dr Andrew Mason of the Department of
Engineering Science at the
University of Auckland is looking for a graduate student to undertake
an
innovative simulation and optimisation based project as part of a
Masters degree
in 1997. The research component of this degree will involve developing
simulation and/or optimisation systems to enhance an automated queue
management
system developed by an Auckland-based technology company. This company
is a
major player in its field, with an installed base that includes well
known
companies in both New Zealand and Australia. This project will
introduce
Operations Research technologies to further enhance the intelligence of
the
queue management system. Sponsorship funding will be available to
support an
applicant with good programming skills and a solid background in
queueing
systems, simulation and/or optimisation. The ideal applicant will need
to
interact with both the company's growing development team and clients
in New
Zealand and possibly Australia. Please contact Andrew Mason at the
address below
for further information.

MEETINGS CALENDAR

INFORMS San Diego Spring 1997 Meeting 4 - 7 May 1997

Town and Country Hotel, San Diego CA

General Chair: Fred Raafat, San Diego State University,
College of Bus.
Adm.